Performance comparison between kmeans and RevoScaleR rxKmeans

In my previous blog post, I was focusing on data manipulation tasks with RevoScaleR Package in comparison to other data manipulation packages and at the end conclusions were obvious; RevoScaleR can not (without the help of dplyrXdf) do piping (or chaining) and storing temporary results take time and on top of that, data manipulation can be done easier (cleaner and faster) with dplyr package or data.table package. Another conclusion was, that you should do (as much as possible) all the data manipulation tasks within your client, so you diminish the value of the data sent to computation environment.

In this post, I will do a simple performance comparison between kmeans clustering function available in default stats package and RevoScaleR rxKmeans function for clustering.

In essence, I will be using same dataset, and comparing same algorithm (Lloyd) with same variables (columns) taken with all parameters the same. So RevoScaleR rxKmeans with following columns:

rxSalesCluster

vs. kmeans example:

SalesCluster

After running 50 iterations on both of the algorithms, measured two metrics. First one was elapsed computation time and second one was the ratio between the “between-cluster sum of squares” and “total within-cluster sum of squares”.

fit

tot.withinss [totss]

Total within-cluster sum of squares, i.e. sum(withinss).

betweenss [betweenss]

The between-cluster sum of squares, i.e. totss-tot.withinss.

Graph of the performance over 50 iterations with both clustering functions.

The performance results are very much obvious, rxKmeans function from RevoScaleR package outperforms stats kmeans by almost 3-times, which is at given dataset (143K Rows and 5 variables) a pretty substantiate improvement due to parallel computation.

kmeans average computation time is little below 4 seconds and rxKmeans computation time is little over 1 second. Please keep in mind that additional computation is performed in this time for clusters fit but in terms of time difference, it remains the same. From graph and from variance/standard deviations, one can see that rxKmeans has higher deviations which results in spikes on graph and are results of parallelizing the data on file. Every 6th iteration there is additional workload / worker dedicated for additional computation.

But the biggest concern is the results itself. Over 50 iterations I stored also the computation of with-in and between cluster sum of squares calculations. And results are stunning.